An Integrated Scheduling Problem of Container Handling Equipment in the Loading Operation at Automated Container Terminals

In automated container terminals, containers are transported between the ship and storage yard by automated vehicles. To improve the productivity of an automated container terminal, it is important to harmoniously synchronize operations of different types of container handling equipment, e.g. automated guided vehicle (AGV), yard crane (YC) and quay crane (QC). This paper seeks to address the scheduling problem of all the handling equipment in an integrated way by utilizing information about yard storage locations for the loading operation in an automated container terminal. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is developed to formulate the problem. The objective of this paper is to minimise the ship’s berth time. As the existing solver cannot solve the MIP model for large sizes in a reasonable time, we propose a genetic algorithm (GA) to obtain approximate optimal solutions to tackle this problem. Computational results are provided to demonstrate the benefits of integrated methods and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.